37 peacocks reported missing from historic hotel...
... He added that the four remaining peacocks at the hotel are acting upset and demonstrating behavior he has “never seen from them before.” ...
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
GOP U. S. House of Representatives decides to . . .
Not sure what they're smokin' over there at CNBC this afternoon:
... On Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he was speaking with Maxwell’s defense lawyer to see if Maxwell “would be willing to speak with prosecutors” to see if she “has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims.” ...
... Blanche previously served as a criminal defense lawyer for Trump when the president was indicted in four separate cases after ending his first White House term in January 2017. ...
Trend for Oceanic Nino Index, revised, 1951-2024
This revision incorporates data revisions since the 2004-05 season, now to two decimal places instead of one starting in season 2005-06.
Conclusions remain unchanged from previously: overall anomaly trend is slightly cooler, forecasting a drier West Coast and wetter Great Lakes region; cool anomaly seasons are trending slightly less severe, and the trend of warm anomaly seasons trending higher may have been broken, but only time will tell.
Food items making new all time high average prices in the United States in June 2025
All prices are FRED data from the St. Louis Fed in U.S. dollars.
The headlines are correct. Average beef prices are out of this world in June 2025:
Round Roast $7.762/lb
All Uncooked Beef Roasts $8.203
Ground Chuck $6.103
Choice Chuck Roast $8.197
100% Ground Beef $6.12
All Uncooked Ground Beef $6.342
All Uncooked Beef Steaks $11.491
Choice Sirloin Steak $12.923.
But that's not all:
Whole Chicken $2.086
Frozen Orange Juice Concentrate $4.493
Coffee $8.132
Potato Chips $6.815
Ice Cream $6.493.
Most of the other items in my list of over 40 basic food products remain near their average all time highs. Food price inflation was 3% year-over-year in June 2025. There has been no actual food price deflation since 2016.
Monday, July 21, 2025
Trump is shoring up UK defenses with B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs deployed to U.S. fighter squadrons based there
The British tabloids have been full of stories about Russian threats to use nuclear weapons against the UK.
Buzz Aldrin turned 95 in January
July 20, 1969 was also a Sunday. The live broadcast of the one giant leap for mankind was at 9:56pm Central Time.
Trump's NASA budget cuts threaten Congressionally-mandated identification of city-killing near-earth-objects
... Astronomers have found roughly 95 per cent of the near-Earth objects larger than 1km, and none of them poses any threat to Earth. We know much less about the smaller ones. An asteroid as slender as 50m across can wreck a city. Of the nearly quarter of a million that are around that size in Earth’s neighbourhood, 93 per cent remain undiscovered. ...
In July 1994, fragments of a comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter, and Nasa, for the first time ever, caught the spectacle on video. Later that summer, Congress tasked Nasa with mapping all near-Earth objects larger than 1km, sobered by the sight of the comet’s cataclysmic Earth-sized impacts. The brief was then expanded to include 90 per cent of all objects 140m or larger — a task that is still less than halfway complete. ...
In 2028, Nasa plans to launch an infrared asteroid-detecting telescope called NEO Surveyor. The following year, which the UN has designated “International Year of Asteroid Awareness and Planetary Defence”, an asteroid called Apophis [~375m] will pass within 32,000km of Earth, closer than some satellites. A Nasa spacecraft is on its way to study Apophis in detail. ...
More.
Sunday, July 20, 2025
People who agree to become organ donors risk being aggressively harvested when they might otherwise recover
We're getting more like China everyday.
Push for More Organ Transplants Putting Donors at Risk...
... Circulatory death donation is different. These patients are on life support, often in a coma. Their prognoses are more of a medical judgment call.
They are alive, with some brain activity, but doctors have determined that they are near death and won’t recover. If relatives agree to donation, doctors withdraw life support and wait for the patient’s heart to stop. This has to happen within an hour or two for the organs to be considered viable. After the person is declared dead, surgeons go in.
The Times found that some organ procurement organizations — the nonprofits in each state that have federal contracts to coordinate transplants — are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.
Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told The Times they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory death.
Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors. ...
Circulatory death donation used to be largely forbidden. That began to change in the 1990s, when a dying patient asked the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to remove her life support and donate her organs. The hospital honored her wishes, then spent two years creating guidelines for future cases. Use of the practice gradually spread. ...
Saturday, July 19, 2025
The EU spent more on anti-carbon lunacy in 2024 than on defense
... the EU is now promising to cut carbon emissions by 90% in just 15 years. This goes even further than its already foolhardy promise of a 55% cut by 2030. ...
The EU splurged $381 billion just in 2024 on solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and the like — more than its entire spending on defense. This is delivering skyrocketing electricity bills — last year they were two times higher than in the US. ...
... the climate impact from the EU’s policies will be next-to-nothing. Run the promised 90% by 2040 and net-zero by 2050 in the United Nations’ own climate model and compare the temperature outcome with the current policy. Because the EU matters little in global emissions and because it has already cut emissions significantly, it will only reduce global emissions through the 21st century by a small 3%. The temperature difference in 2050 is a vanishing 0.02°F and even by 2100 the impact will be impossible to measure at 0.07°F.
All while models show that the cost for the EU by mid-century could be more than $3 trillion every year — more than all current public spending in the EU. ...
More.
Friday, July 18, 2025
What a shock, right, Trump's attacks on Powell's extravagance turn out to be completely hypocritical, including when you consider that he redecorated the Oval Orifice in gold leaf
... As the Fed moved forward with plans to renovate its Great
Depression-era headquarters in Washington during Trump’s first term, it
faced concerns in 2020 during a vetting process involving Trump
appointees, who called for more “white Georgia marble” for the facade of
building.
The Fed’s architects said the central bank had wanted glass walls to
reflect the Fed as a transparent institution, but three Trump appointees
to a local commission felt marble best fit the building’s historic
character. Marble was added as a result, according to the minutes of the
Commission of Fine Arts, which advises the federal government on
architecture. ...
Russ Vought, Trump’s top budget adviser, cited “premium marble” in a letter to Powell last week as an example of the “ostentatious overhaul.” ...
Trump issued [an] executive order in December 2020, which criticized modernist architecture and expressed a preference for “beautiful” classical buildings with more [costly] traditional designs. ...
Thursday, July 17, 2025
As I said, TACO Trump & Co. talked up destruction of Fordow because that's the only one of the three sites they destroyed
The bunker buster bombs were made for Fordow, so they bombed Fordow with them, and talked Fordow, Fordow, Fordow, "obliteration", blah blah blah.
Military-industrial complex, rinse and repeat.
Meanwhile the threat remains, and the not serious people remain in charge.
Trump Always Chickens Out.
New U.S. assessment finds American strikes destroyed only one of three Iranian nuclear sites
WASHINGTON — One of the three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran struck by the United States last month was mostly destroyed, setting work there back significantly. But the two others were not as badly damaged and may have been degraded only to a point where nuclear enrichment could resume in the next several months if Iran wants it to, according to a recent U.S. assessment of the destruction caused by the military operation, five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the assessment told NBC News. ...
U.S. officials believe the attack on Fordo, which has long been viewed as a critical component of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, was successful in setting back Iranian enrichment capabilities at that site by as much as two years, according to two of the current officials.
Much of the administration’s public messaging about the strikes has focused on Fordo. ...
U.S. officials knew before the airstrikes that Iran had structures and enriched uranium at Natanz and Isfahan that were likely to be beyond the reach of even America’s 30,000-pound GBU-57 “bunker buster” bombs, three of the sources said. Those bombs, which had never been used in combat before the strikes, were designed with the deeply buried facilities carved into the side of a mountain at Fordo in mind.
As early as 2023, though, there were indications that Iran was digging tunnels at Natanz that were below where the GBU-57 could reach. There are also tunnels deep underground at Isfahan. The United States hit surface targets at Isfahan with Tomahawk missiles and did not drop GBU-57s there, but it did use them at Natanz. ...
Trump was briefed on the so-called all-in plan, but it was rejected ultimately because it would have required a sustained period of conflict. ...
Before the June airstrikes, the regime had enough fissile material for about nine to 10 bombs, according to U.S. officials and United Nations inspectors. ...
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
J. D. Vance has had to cast six tiebreaker votes so far in the Republican-controlled U. S. Senate, this time to advance legislation cutting a measly $9 billion in spending
Vance casts Senate tiebreaker to advance Trump’s DOGE-inspired cuts
... This was Vance’s sixth tiebreaker in the Senate, following his deciding vote on July 1 to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. ...
Today's core wholesale price report breaks the nine-month-string of producer prices increasing year over year at 3% or more, but as always there will be revisions
Here are the current June 2025 yoy figures for core producer price increases Dec-Jun, followed by the figures reported the previous month, followed by the figures as originally reported:
December 2024: 3.74%, 3.74%, 3.5%
January 2025: 3.92, 3.92, 3.6
February 2025: 3.73, 3.74, 3.4
March 2025: 3.86, 3.91, 3.3
April 2025: 3.13, 3.18, 3.1
May 2025: 3.20, 3.02 (revised up as predicted)
June 2025: 2.60.
The optimism of the original figures has been removed by the revisions to Dec-Mar available only but lately.
December and January revisions alone still hold fast today, but not thereafter.
As always it is important not to press the monthly results too strongly, but the May revised uptick is consistent with a down-up, down-up, down-up pattern which is obviously trending down.
Viewed on a semiannual basis, however, we are Wei Tu Hai, and trending Wong Wei Charlie.
Electricity posts its highest semiannual average price ever in 1H2025, under Mad King Ludwig
The average price hit a record 19-cents per kWhr in June.
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